HUGE Woodcarving Begun

I wanted to show you the beginnings of my new woodcarving.  You have to look pretty closely here, because I've only lightly sketched it in with pencil.  Basically, this pic is to give you a concept of its size. 

The picture below shows the top of the tree only, and is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the entire piece.

As you can see from this photo (by the way, this is post-bike ride hair, so just forget-about-it!) I've begun the carving at the bottom.  I'm going to cut out all the negative space around the tree before I do any texturing on the tree itself.

The carving at the bottom represents two sessions; I've forgotten how physical carving is, and this last session exhausted my hand!  Time to stop for the night.  Once again, I big off one big bite, and I'm pretty sure this one's going to take me the lion's share of the winter to finish.  You can also note by the picture below that I've made some early cuts around the edge lines of the tree.  These isolate the tree so I don't (ideally) mistakenly cut into it.  I'll post photos as I progress.